Ready for college? ("Reports show many local kids aren’t.") NW Ga.

Dalton Daily Citizen ^ | May 23, 2011 | Rachel Brown

[barmag25]

DALTON — Students are taught to dream about college from the time they’re in elementary school. Getting an education is more important than ever to landing a well-paying job, they’re told, and financial aid options since their parents’ time have greatly expanded.

But what if students aren’t ready for college level work when they get there?

Reports show many local kids aren’t.

According to the Georgia Department of Education’s annual report card, some 41.3 percent of Dalton Public Schools graduates from 2009 who attend Georgia public colleges needed remedial classes. For graduates of Whitfield County Schools, the number was 47.6 percent, and for Murray County Schools grads it was 53.6 percent. That’s roughly double the statewide average of 23.8 percent needing remedial work for the 2009-2010 school year.

At Dalton State College, some 1,418 of the school’s roughly 6,000 students were in some kind of remedial class, also known as learning support, during the 2010 fall semester.

[VRW Conspirator]

Well, I guess they will be ready to vote...democrat.

[elpadre]

I have often wondered what part of these large tuitions can be attributed to non-credit courses required to bring sub-standard students up to speed, ready to take credit courses.

[paint_your_wagon]

ping

[T-Bird45]

Stopped, ate, and spent the night in Dalton GA last Fri-Sat. If the goofy kid I interacted with at Five Guys Burgers is any indication, I’d say the article is accurate. The kid couldn’t handle entering the order on the POS terminal and couldn’t make change. I try not to have very high expectations in order to control my blood pressure.

[tiki]

You know, not everyone is brilliant and with the state of public schools I don’t know what they expect.

[Traveler59]

Well, I will be the first to admit I was not ready for my first foray into the University system. Coming from a small rural town (Pop. 3700) onto a campus that had 15,000 students at any one time kind of overwhelmed me. Took some time off and joined the military. Eventually went back to school and did much better.

[bossmechanic]

Same story for Harris Co., GA

My son graduated HS with very good grades. Now he’s doing 2 years at CSU - basically to teach him how to study and how to write in something more than monosylable tweetery.
I saw this coming but not being the custodial parent, I had no influence on how he got through highschool. Now that I’m payin’ the (college) bills, he’s having to take my critique of his writing and analytical skills to heart - and is doing considerably better.

I know it’s fashionable to laud teachers for their dedication etc. But I’ve met very few that truly have the students well-being at heart. What I see are primarily glorified babysitters unable to control their classrooms and content to settle for passive mediocrity. Very few are what I would term “professionals.
My son wants to be a mechanical engineer. I’m not gonna let him be a crappy engineer. Crappy scientists become MMGW prostitutes and that is simply unacceptable. So if he has to spend an extra year or two developing core competencies, so be it.

[Jim Noble]

No more than 25% of the white population has an IQ sufficient to pursue a real BA or BS degree, probably less today than twenty years ago.

The whole current college phenomenon is an enormous scam, one of the biggest ever created.

The enormous waste of resources, the debt, the misdirection of talent from possibly fruitful work into meaningless gibberish, the requirement to praise the worthless - all of it is going to crash, and it won't be pretty when it does.

[blueunicorn6]

The kids from Oakland will be well trained on gender diversity.

[Salgak]

The unspoken assumption here is that all of these students actually had a NEED to go to college. Most jobs today really don’t require a college degree. Or at least what USED to be a college degree: many holders of recent B.A.’s actually have less knowledge than I had, graduating from High School in the 1970s . . .

[yorkie01]

I lived in Dalton a few years back and I can tell you, there are illegals living wall to wall in apartments while working the carpet mills.

[Fire_on_High]

It’s true. I live in Murray County and Dalton is jampacked with em.

[metmom]

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[FreedomPoster]

It will be interesting to see what effect the new GA illegal immigration law has on that. There are a number of large chicken processing operations in the state, and based on my eyeballing of the work force when I was doing some consulting for one, they are the same way.